Polygon Block Performance

    In this dashboard I will be comparing the block performance of Polygon to other Layer 1 and 2 blockchains in the industry.

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    Dashboard Parameters

    timeframe

    This parameter is used for all time related statistics below. This could either be the timescale on the x-axis or the duration represented by each dot in the scatter graphs.

    Recommended Value: day

    Transactions & Blocks

    A transaction in the world of crypto is more than a money transfer. Its more like instructing the miners to execute a piece of your code and storing the parameters & results of that on the blockchain. While this is commonly used for sending coins & tokens around transactions are far more powerful than that.

    In order to secure the execution of transactions and come to a consensusabout which ones have been executed and which state the blockchain is in blocks were created. A block usually consists of one or several transactions and is cryptographically “attached” to the previous and all the next blocks. Blockchains always use some sort of consensus mechanism to decide who has permissions to execute transactions and create a new block.

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    Terminology

    Layer1 vs Layer2 blockchains

    Layer1 blockchains are the most known ones. This category includes chains like BTC, ETH, Doge, Solana and many more. These blockchains operate directly on the underlying network (usually the internet) and therefore require a consensus mechanism for decentralized trust.

    Due to the permissionless nature of the underlying networks and the physical limits attached to it (like latency / packet loss etc) there is only so much capacity for transaction processing on a layer 1 blockchain. While some chains like Solana achieve a very high transaction throughput they had to sacrifice some of their decentralized nature.

    One of the most successful solutions to the scalability issues is the use of Layer2 blockchains. They can take the “trusted execution environment” and consensus provided by the L1 blockchain as a basis for their own transaction processing. Some well known L2 blockchains built on Ethereum as L1 are Polygon, Optimism and Arbitrum, all of which provide a higher transaction throughput at a lower cost than ETH does.

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    Concluding

    • While Polygon does not have particularly fast blocks compared to other L1 (just about average) it has by far the shortest block time compared to the other 2 Layer 2’s
    • L2 block times & tx / block are not directly comparable because of their significant differences in internal workings

    With that out of the way: Time to sit back and take a good looks at the data!

    There will be a comparison of different L1 blockchains to Polygon as well as one for L2s and Polygon.

    Both will have:

    • A line graph showing the average amount of transactions in each block
    • A scatter plot for visualizing the block times
      • X - Axis is the chain
      • Y - Axis is the blocktime
      • The Color is the type of value (Average, Min, Max)
      • The Marker Size is the age of the timeframe (==smaller marker = older, most recent timeframe => largest marker==)

    Polygon L2 vs popular L1s

    Polygon vs Arbitrum vs Optimism

    Findings

    • The TX / block in Solana are around 1000x higher than ETH (which is on rank 2) and also has the lowest average time between blocks => By far highest TPS
    • The block speed ranking is #1 Solana, #2 Flow, #3 Polygon, #4 Osmosis, #5 Ethereum
    • While ETH has a high range of block times (1s up to 120s) it does not fall out of that range
      • All other chains have significant flucutation in their max block time

    Findings

    • It should come to no suprise that every L2 works a little different internally. While this barely makes a difference for the end user its very visible in this segment:
      • Major differences in tx per block
        • Optimism blocks only ever have 1 TX ( => Important for efficient tx fraud proofs, the way Optimism makes sure L2 tx correctness is ensured )
        • Arbitrum average just a little over 1 TX per block ( => Similar to Optimism but can support multiple TX in a block as the fraud proof does not require running all of them on ETH )
        • Polygon is the closest to a L1 which is why you can see ~80 tx / block
      • Completely different block times
        • Arbitrum fluctuates a lot on a block by block basis, going to as low as 1 sec / block and as high as 200s / block

        • Optimism fluctuates very little and is usually around 15-30s / block

        • Polygon hovers around 2s / block with only a few blocks reaching up to 13s / block

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